


Trust Me

by stephanericher



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-31
Updated: 2016-08-31
Packaged: 2018-08-12 02:41:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7917274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stephanericher/pseuds/stephanericher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here there are no comets passing through close enough to raise atmospheric sparks, but if Shiro could see one what would he wish for?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trust Me

He’s greeted by the tang of blood and sweat, loathsome and full in his nose and in his mouth; he coughs a few times as he tries to clear his eyes of the smoke that’s somehow filled them. They don’t use smoke in the arena, not usually; it obscures the prisoners being gored to death by the latest robot monster of the week (or team of them, or team of beasts trained to be vicious and he’s long since stopped feeling bad about hurting them back).

It feels like there’s something missing, even as the smoke dissipates; a throat-scraping shriek erupts from behind him and he turns; there’s that little prisoner, the one who’d been thrown in with them last week, the one who can barely walk they beat him up so badly already and they’re throwing him back in here and there’s definitely something off about this (not about the treatment, because he’s seen worse, but that they’re here right now).

“Above you!”

Shiro whirls; he meets the metal thing’s arm with his own, barely in time; the flesh is stinging and his bone might have cracked but they’re already behind.

“Hide!” he shouts, throwing a kick at the thing’s knee joint.

Another wordless scream; Shiro turns back and a giant goblin-creature has picked up his companion, is lowering him toward its mouth, and he can feel the slash to his chest coming but can’t turn or duck in time and it cuts him, shallow above his sternum and then the blades extend and reach deep into his thigh and he screams and then he remembers that this is how—

This is how he winds up gasping in the dark, cold and bloodless sweat draining from him like his pores are the holes in the sieve of his body, staring at the ceiling, half-obscured in the dark. There’s a weight on his chest above the faint scar from the robot’s knife-arm; it’s just Keith’s hand, his fingers splayed out flat. Keith is here, beside him; Keith is solid and real and here and he is light-years away from the arena, from fighting. He almost repeats that to himself aloud, but it does no good to say it in his head. Shiro pulls Keith’s arm off, places it beside him, and swings his legs over the edge of the bed. The air is cool against his bare arms, but his sweatpants are sticking to his leg, inside the groove of that scar on his leg. It’s healed over now, but it still got there, and that’s how. That’s how he’d gotten those; now that he can picture the rest of the scenario he can remember bits and pieces of how he’d escaped that one, dismembering a robot and using it as a weapon against the creatures, but no, he doesn’t want to think about that, because if he does he’ll think about everything else and he’ll get thrown back there all over again (and knowing it’s not real in this very moment doesn’t make it any better).

And still, he retraces it, the cuts he’d taken and the cuts he’d made, the steps on the floor, the pattern of his breathing. He tells himself to stop again; he starts again.

“Shiro.”

Sleep is clinging to Keith’s voice like a sock fresh from the dryer.

“Go back to sleep,” says Shiro (better to spare him all this, not worry him further).

“You’ve been sitting like that for ten minutes.”

Has it only been that much? It seems like it’s been longer, that the scene itself was longer and it’s replayed itself in his head so many times already that it’s burning into his brain (how could he have forgotten it in the first place?) and he takes a breath to steady himself. The bed creaks beside him, a disruption in the steady hum of the ship; Keith rolls over and sits up halfway, still wrapped in blankets like jewelry tangled in a drawer, and presses his face between Shiro’s shoulder blades. His hand finds Shiro’s wrist but doesn’t wrap around it; he seems satisfied that it’s still there. And Shiro’s acutely aware of other scars, white lines and crude markers of cruder stitches, whose origins he still hasn’t remembered and wouldn’t much like to, that Keith has to feel beneath the thin layer of Shiro’s sweat-soaked shirt.

“Trust me,” Keith whispers.

Shiro’s stomach constricts; his wrist flexes under Keith’s fingers. How can he not? But how can he say this, any of it? It’s not about Keith knowing (he knows enough already to guess the rest); it’s not about seeing him like this; it’s not about trust except it is, about trusting himself as much as it is trusting Keith. It’s about not being afraid of words, about knowing that saying this does not make it any more or less real. (Which prospect is more terrifying?) Shiro takes a breath, resets himself, flips his palm over and holds Keith’s hand. He’s not going to delay it any longer.

“I dreamed I was back there. That I was a Galra gladiator again, that I had to fight—it was.” He pauses. “It was a particular fight, when I was trying to guard someone who had no business being there, and I…I couldn’t…”

Shiro closes his eyes again and again that terrified face fills his mind, the face of another person he couldn’t save, who had trusted Shiro with his life. And he’d betrayed that trust, just moments after receiving it. Keith squeezes his hand; Shiro takes a few more shuddery breaths. When he’s beginning to feel his heartbeat drop back slower and softer, Keith speaks.

“It’s over now. That’s not ever going to happen to you again.”

And there’s a tacit _I won’t let it_ that several months ago, when he’d landed back on earth and all of this had started, Shiro would have dismissed as arrogance (but Keith would have said it anyway if he’d been given the chance, with the same wild-coyote-bite ferocity in his voice and meant it all the same) because even with a superweapon, the Galra Empire is so many orders of magnitude larger than they are, and even though everyone who ever set foot in that coliseum was desperate enough to try anything to stop the empire they couldn’t even make a dent in it from the inside—but even if it’s possible, even though they’re fighting this war to end the empire’s rule, they’re only chipping away at the edges now, and it might be years before they strike a truly significant blow. In that time, how many people could go through the same process? How many could endure blow after blow? How many wouldn’t make it, or come out far worse than Shiro had? Even if they defeat Zarkon tomorrow, that won’t end the reach and sick appeal of those matches across the galaxy and it won’t put an end to all of their suffering.

So what’s the point? What’s the point of any of this? It’s washing over Shiro all over again like a wave of swampy water, the same kind of despair that he’d felt back then, that he’d felt moments ago in the dreamscape-arena, squeezing his organs and scratching at his insides as if it had been trying to chew through his skin.

Keith raises his head from Shiro’s back, releases his hand, and scoots over so he’s sitting next to Shiro, pressed against his side like a bottle packed in Styrofoam. He wraps his arm around Shiro’s waist and squeezes hard (sometimes Shiro forgets just how strong Keith’s grip has gotten, even given how much he trains), staring up at Shiro’s face. His brow is creased and his mouth is paused in a soft frown, but his gaze is strong and steady enough to make Shiro’s heart wring itself halfway out of the twine twisting his insides. Shiro looks away.

Outside the window, the distant stars wink against the emptiness of deep space, the starlight somehow almost fake-looking when Shiro’s still used to the filters of the atmosphere, the colors of the sky and the planes and spaceships and artificial satellites in the air among the stars. Here there are no comets passing through close enough to raise atmospheric sparks, but if Shiro could see one what would he wish for?

It’s not that there’s nothing he wants. He wants even more time with Keith, but would asking for that be greedy? What about the people suffering at Zarkon’s hands? Should he wish for an immediate Voltron victory, or would those words be taken by some cosmic force in the wrong direction? Would he wish for something impossible, like a retroactive undoing of wrongs? Would that be a waste? His eyelids are growing heavy and he leans on Keith; he’s too anxious, too wired to fall asleep right now. (Isn’t he?) Keith shifts beside him and Shiro tries to open his eyes; outside the window is some kind of blur for half a second before he closes them again. He’s not falling asleep; he tells himself to focus on the hum of the engine or the rhythm of Keith’s breathing, to not let himself fall—

Light floods Shiro’s eyes behind their lids, and he half-groans. He shifts a little to the left and immediately his side screams out like a melodramatic stage actor trying to reach the back of the auditorium with no microphone. He’d fallen asleep; he’d fallen asleep in this awkward position (he’d fallen asleep and no bad dreams had come his way). Keith is lying twisted like a fancy pastry, half-sitting on the edge of the bed next to Shiro but his torso is lying over Shiro’s chest and his face is buried in the crook of Shiro’s left shoulder and his arm is draped over the sheets. He nestles in further, as much as he can, and sighs; Shiro would very much like to let him sleep but his eyes have adjusted to the light and they’re doing a flyby of a beautiful solar system and the light’s coming from dancing binary stars.

“Keith,” he says. “Hey.”

Keith raises his head, winces, pretends he hadn’t winced, and then lowers it. “Morning.”

He rolls over and off of Shiro; the sudden absence of his warm body is a little unwelcome even though he’s still tucked up against Shiro’s side.

“You doing okay?” Keith says.

His eyes are fuzzy with sleep, but they’re scrutinizing his face, and just thinking about thinking about it makes Shiro want to close his eyes and make it go away, makes him want to grab at his chest and check behind him for anyone cowering in understandable fear. But the twin stars are bright and it’s Keith’s face he’s looking into.

“Yeah.”

And he is, for now.

**Author's Note:**

> im still bitter about missing sheith week ngl (some of the prompts were great....)


End file.
